It’s been a long time since I was a teenager, but we watched it in my 12th grade Lit class (we’d already taken the AP exam and were whiling away the hours) in 1996, years after it came out.
Of course, we were also the class that voted “Don’t You Forget About Me” to be our prom theme. We may have been stuck in the 80s.
Couldn’t agree with you more (I actually thought it sucked the first time around!) Wasn’t there some talking food or kitchen utensils as well? Yeah, not John Cusack’s finest. I want my 2 dollars!
I like Better Off Dead. I don’t love it, but I like it. I LOOOVED it in about 1990, when I was 17.
Real Genius was just on TV last week, and it sucked huge dick. I couldn’t watch the whole thing - parts were so embarrassingly badly acted or written, that I had to switch back and forth with some other show. Ha Ha! Val Kilmer has a shirt that says “I Love Toxic Waste!” And he’s on an admittance interview! How irreverent!
Ugh…
Joe
“Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.” I was so excited to show it to my wife for the first time, after how enraptured I was seeing it in the theater when it came out. Now… the martial arts are great of course, and the acting is good… but the pacing is just very very odd. (Which is a nice way of saying it’s boring.) Won’t be planning to watch it again soon.
Breaking Away seemed poised to be in the pantheon of great teen comedies. Now I barely remember who Dennis Christopher is.
Well, I might not go so far as to say it hasn’t “stood the test of time”—it’s not THAT bad, and indeed, it has quite a few outstanding qualities that you just can’t get made into a movie these days, even a drama—but some elements of “The Andromeda Strain” have not aged well. Mostly the “hip” two-bit psychedelia crammed in for show, and the somewhat…well, I need a word somewhere between “naive” and “crass” for the anti-establishment and “machines are dehumanizing us” attitudes from the story and the characters. I mean, it was filmed in 1971, so I can understand the context, but…lordy.
It also includes the Standard Poignant Shot of a pretty dead young lady wearing a peace sign necklace; you’ll recall that this was the interim upgrade from the Standard Poignant Shot of a dead/dying lady in a shawl clutching an infant, as first developed in 1915.
Plus, the [spoiler]evil twist of the “Scoop” program being used specifically to find alien microbes to use as bio warfare agents. Mostly through someone running a computer simulation of an Andromeda outbreak in the continental U.S., and the map display coming back labeled “Bio Warfare Simulation 1. Agent: Andromeda” It’s been awhile since I’ve read it, though I think this was in the original book…though I recall that it was more subtle, more like a passing strong suspicion of a character or two. But in the film, it actually comes across as something that could be dismissed as result of paranoia and a lack of computer savvy on the part of the accusing characters. I mean, you’d probably use the some software in simulating a biological attack as an alien disease outbreak…it could just as easily be that someone just didn’t bother to change a line of text.
Especially amusing, in hindsight, considering that in real life, the U.S. biological warfare program had been shut down two years earlier…by order of President Nixon.[/spoiler]
Actually, the general attitude towards technology in this movie gets pretty hillarious. I mean, I know, it’s a product of it’s time, and I’m looking at it from the perspective of an early 21st century guy who’s basically grown up using computers…but geez, watching the people in this movie in this movie act like the apes seeing the Monolith when they have to use a monochrome computer terminal (“But why? Stupid machine—what makes his blood too acid?!”)—and basically a normal computer, not even a magical thinking Hollywood computer, at that? Comedy gold. 
Still…good movie.
You are dead to me. Dead.
There is a definite shift in movie pacing sometime in the early '80s though. 1970s films often have a much slower tempo to them - you’ll have long shots of people driving from place to place, lengthy dialogue scenes, long silences and so forth. The Blues Brothers, although we tend to remember the catchy quips, is slow-paced - it’s several minutes before anyone even says anything, and much of the humor is very deadpan. It requires a certain patience and engagement that you don’t need for modern films. If you want “zany” comedy, try the excrescence that is Blues Brothers 2000.
(And even by this standard, 2001 is sloooooooow. That is entirely the point.)
Back to TRON: I don’t really have a problem with old-tech films and the inside-the-computer scenes are still pretty good. It’s the rest of the film - the horrible over-the-top-eightiesness of the real-world scenes - that has aged badly. The last time I watched this I kept shouting “Yeah, yeah, get in the computer already!” Roll on, the sequel.
The Nancy Drew Series- as the Maisie films.
In my opinion most Marx films don’t stack up well either as their humour has been copied so often.
Laurel and Hardy were never funny.
Wall Street I really liked this movie in the 1980s. Now, it is unwatchable unless you’re watching it as a satire of the Reagan years. I never want to see the “Greed is good” clip ever again. How many thousands of times did news programs show that during the past few months?
I’m pretty sure this explanation is not in the movie.
Hell no! That movie still rocks, just as much as it did when I saw it the first time. I even watched it with my li’l brother a few months ago and he liked it.
However, movies like **Bullit **and the original Italian Job are way to slowly paced. Not that I saw them when they were new.
But Clueless was based on Jane Austen’s Emma. I thought Cher’s somewhat silly social setting was a pretty good match for life among the gentry in early 19th century England. Both pretty far from here & now. But both stories were told with wit & style.
And I’ll have to disagree with whomever said that the first Star Wars movie was full of “fantasy cliches.” Those were Space Opera cliches, from a genre that was already old hat to anybody who’d kept up with SF. Puh-leeze–a spaceport barfilled with the scum of the spaceways? Nothing profound–hey, we’d already seen 2001. But it was great fun & still is.
Was Ferris Bueller ever really for an adult audience? My middle schooler liked it.
I mean, the 1970’s were a WEIRD time. Not to mentin J travolta’s pre-$cientoloy looks
Will anybody step up and admit to wearing leisure suits (as per “DiscoStu”)?
I don’t disagree with you, but much of the dialogue is 90s-era catch phrases like “As If!” and “I’m Audi!” At one point Cher describes a cute guy as being “kind of a Baldwin.” No way is any young person going to know what that means 20 years from now.
Yeah, I think there’s a distinction to be made between films that have aged poorly and films that you just outgrew.
In high school in the late 90’s and early 00’s, I went through a phase where I thought The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller were amazing, profound movies.
Now I can’t sit through more than ten minutes of either of them, although Ferris is a little better because at least it’s sort of fun.
Both movies are full of whiny, obnoxious little douchebags who need to get the fuck over themselves… but that sort of works when you’re a teenager, and lots of kids don’t have any problem with dated clothing and music if they like the movie otherwise. It gives them something extra to laugh about, if nothing else.
My little sister - five years my junior - went through a similar phase just a few years ago with the same movies.
I think the same applies to 90’s movies like Clueless or Empire Records. The fashions and music are totally outdated now, but the movies at their core are still a lot of fun.
I would agree with this. Certain movies have to been seen at a certain point in your life. The life dramas in Breakfast Club don’t really mean much to adults. That is sort of the point of the movie, that teenagers really have this high level of drama, even if the causes seem silly to their parents. The only people that kind of thing should really speak to are those going through similar phases, or those that never got over them.
How much relevance would On Golden Pond have for a 16 year old?
Also on the “getting older” front, and the rapidly changing values of the times…
Pump up the Volume seemed to be the “voice of teens”, but now just seems silly (“you just don’t understand my spoiled middle-class stresses, mom!”) compared to what today’s kids actually face. And pirate radio? In the internet blogosphere world, it just feels so naive.
It does have Samantha Mathis frontal though, so it still provides a valued foundation to today’s filmmakers.
Wait, what problems do today’s kids face that the spoiled middle class brats of the 80s wouldn’t understand?
I honestly can’t comprehend the people who say that the 80s were a more naive and idealistic time and 80s kids were innocent of the horrible problems teens of today face.
I mean, seriously, come on. What exactly are these problems that plague the kids of today?
I admit that often the problems that kids in movies face are pretty small potatoes (“My parents don’t understand my love of ice skating!” “My parents don’t understand that I’ve got the hots for a brooding loner who plays by his own rules!”). Yeah, often the problems presented in kids movies of the 80s, 40s, 30s, 60s, 90s, 70s or 50s seem pretty stupid. That doesn’t mean that those were the real problems kids in those days faced. The problems presented in kids movies of the 00s don’t seem so difficult either (“How can I be a world-famous pop star yet still have a normal teenage social life!”)
Hard to put my finger on it exactly, but recent movies like Juno or Little Miss Sunshine seem to ring truer to my adult ears for teens having to shoulder more morally serious responsibilities and burdens. Even going a few years back, American Beauty seemed to have teens grappling with more serious issues beyond simply building a movie around Molly Ringwald’s trying to afford a prom dress. Most of the John Hughes era just feels very isolated and sheltered from the “real” world of adults, while today’s movies have the real world heavily overlapping and intruding into the otherwise idyllic teen world.